When to Disable Motion Blur in Games (And When Not To)
The term "motion blur" is almost a taboo phrase among gamers, but the truth is that this visual feature has a very specific role that is critical to making your games look and play well. So let's look at when to leave it on or turn it off.
What Is Motion Blur?
Take your hand and wave it rapidly in front of your face. That's motion blur. You can see it all around you in the real world. It includes the wings of a hummingbird in flight, spinning car wheels, or when you look out of a car or train window and see the world flash by in a blur. Blur happens because although light is so fast it might as well be instantaneous, the light sensors we use to create images take time to work.
In the human eye, your retinas react to photons using electrochemistry, and then send that information to your brain as electrical signals. If motion is fast enough, like when you wave your hand in front of your face, photons from the object in motion will hit your retina in different places at almost the same time, creating the effect of blur.
The same thing happens to camera sensors. Fast motion will appear as motion blur in your recording because photons from the moving object trace a path across the image sensor for the duration of one frame. In cameras we can reduce or eliminate motion blur using a camera shutter, a device that controls how long light has to hit your sensor.
If you have a very high shutter speed, you'll get crisp images with little to no blur, if you have a slow shutter speed you'll get a lot of blur. Cinematic videographers usually have a shutter speed twice as fast as the frame rate which simulates natural motion blur. Pay attention to the term "natural motion blur," because it's going to be important in the discussion of motion blur in games.
Why Do Games Need Motion Blur?
If motion blur is such a bad thing in games, why do developers keep using it? There are two important reasons motion blur should be in a game: to create a pleasant and realistic image and to
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